How to help children control their emotions: 4 keys
Many fathers and mothers believe in a myth that, if applied to all facets of parenting, can be very harmful for the little ones in the house. This belief consists of the idea that boys and girls should limit themselves to relating to their emotions by expressing them spontaneously, without striving to learn from them or the consequences of having them regulated in one way or another.
Actually, helping children learn to control their emotions is fundamental . Then we will see why this is so and how we can do our part so that they get used to living their emotional part making it play in their favor.
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Why is it good for children to control their emotions?
It is important to bear in mind that although the way in which we experience emotions in the first person is subjective, the consequences of expressing them in one way or another are objective. So much so that a good part of the process that converts us into adults consists in master some basic emotional regulation skills that allow us to achieve long-term goals and live in society.
If we take for granted that the only thing that matters is to experience emotions, without further ado, we are feeding a philosophy of life that sees the emotional and affective aspect as something of which we are passive subjects and of which we participate only as recipients. The ideal is, in any case, to be clear that one should and can consciously influence the psychological processes linked to feelings and affections ... and that this skill must be taught already during childhood.
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How to teach emotional self-control to boys and girls
So, next we will review several tips on how to encourage children to control their emotions according to their goals and interests, instead of being a mere recipient of emotional states.
However, it must be borne in mind that very young children, aged 7 or younger, will have difficulty thinking about certain nuances attributable to emotions. For example, they will understand what "fear" means, but they will have a hard time understanding what fear is of not being able to do something. That is why parents, mothers and guardians must adapt to the degree of abstraction in which the child is capable of thinking.
1. Educates in affective prediction
Affective prediction is the mental ability that allows us to establish predictions about our emotional state in the future. Putting the focus on this aptitude makes it easier for the little ones to learn why it is useful and good to learn to manage emotions, since it favors the habit of compare expectations, on the one hand, and reality, on the other .
A proposed activity, for example, may be asking the child to think about how he thinks he will feel if he is going to talk to a boy or girl with whom he would like to befriend, and ask him, once he has gone to meet that other person , think about how you feel and compare your emotional state with the one you predicted. In these cases, it is very frequent that a degree of fear and tension has been predicted that is much higher than that experienced later.
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2. Teach him to postpone gratification
The ability to postpone gratification is one of the most important, since it allows to opt for long-term objectives that require others to be renounced in the short term but that provide much greater benefits.
Put challenges based on putting a time during which you have to give up a prize to access a more important goal It is very good, since it generates the habit based on the constant effort that will bring its fruits in the long term.
For this, it is important to bear in mind that the younger you are, the more difficult it is to postpone the rewards; The idea is not to exceed this minimum time during which you have to put up with it, since this would make the task seem unrealistic.
For example, if it is calculated that there are some math activities to do at home that will take half an hour of work, you can divide that half hour into segments of 10 or 15 minutes, at the end of which there are some minutes of rest or leisure.
3. Do not reward your tantrums
This is very important. Some fathers and mothers, without realizing it, they compensate for having a tantrum , since these situations cause discomfort and discomfort, and giving what one wants is the simplest way to make the immediate problem disappear. However, society does not work like that.
On the one hand, the family is the only group of people who have the duty and responsibility to spend time with that future adult, so the rest have no reason to consider giving in to that blackmail, and on the other, riding in anger it does not favor that one learns to solve things , If not the opposite.
Thus, one of the best ways to help young children, or children in self-care, learn to control their emotions, is simply not to give rewards for expressing in a very extreme way their feelings of anger and anger.
4. Build together explanations about failures
Controlling emotions is always put a certain amount of effort to be able to aspire to long-term goals or that have to do with participation in social circles. Frustration can make children embrace the idea that regulating emotions in order to reach long-term goals is useless, and that the renouncements made along the way have not been worthwhile.
So, it is good that in situations that can produce frustration, the older ones help the children to understand what has happened, and to see that where at first it seemed that the efforts have been in vain, what has happened is that they It has had greater chances of success, although it may not be obvious.
For example, if after having studied something more than normal for an exam the note received has been bad, the child may think that this result would have been exactly the same as it would have obtained if he had yielded to the feeling of fear and not I would have bothered to face this discomfort exposing myself to the uncomfortable task of practicing with exercises that one finds difficult. Make him see that behind that apparent failure there has been progress is key.
